Drawing Tips | The Story Elves - Help with writing, editing, illustrating and designing your own stories

- Tip -

Adding hair and ears

6

In the previous tip, we created a very basic face.  Now it’s time to add hair and ears!  As with the eyes, nose and mouth, it is always good to know where things go.

For elves and humans, there is an interesting rule you can follow to find the hairline at the top of the forehead.  First, we measure the distance from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of the face.  Then, we measure that same distance above the eye line to see where the hairline starts.

Adding hair and ears | The Story Elves - Help with writing, editing, illustrating and designing your own stories

Finally, ears extend from just above the eye line to the bottom of the nose.  I am drawing human ears.  Elven ears are longer, of course.

Adding hair and ears | The Story Elves - Help with writing, editing, illustrating and designing your own stories

And we might want to give him a neck.

This is not the most interesting face, but this tip and the one previously are only about where things go.  A face has a lot of different features, and if each of these features is in the wrong place, even slightly the wrong place, the face tends to look odd.  So, we want to practice where things go over and over.

Eyes, noses, mouths and ears come in a variety of shapes and sizes and make a face unique.  When we know where things go, we can focus on practicing changing the look of the different features.

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The Story Elves - Help with writing, editing, illustrating and designing your own stories